In one of the largest wrongful death cases Virginia has ever seen, a jury awarded a Plaintiff over $6 million dollars to compensate him for the death of his wife in a motor vehicle accident. The driver of the other vehicle was an employee of Allied Concrete Company, and lost control of his loaded concrete truck, causing it to tip over and land on the vehicle occupied by Plaintiff and his wife. The wife’s injuries
A federal Appeals Court invalided President Obama’s “recess” appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”). All of the Board’s actions for 2012 are invalid. (Do the taxpayers get a refund?) No new rulings from the Board are possible until members are validly appointed and there is a quorum. Without the “recess” appointments, the Board now has only a single member. An independent government agency, the NLRB investigates and prosecutes unfair labor issues and runs
Courts in criminal cases don’t feel that they have equity powers. In the latest decision wherein any layman would expect the court to act leniently, the Court of Appeals held that a defendant who was improperly transferred to the Department of Corrections (prison) could not have his sentence modified by the Circuit Court due to lack of jurisdiction even though the Circuit Court had ordered the defendant to remain in its jurisdiction (the County jail )
A defendant charged with Possession of Marijuana entered a plea agreement with the prosecutor to plead guilty to Reckless Driving. He paid a small fine. Later, he sought to expunge the Possession of Marijuana charge but was denied by the Fairfax Circuit Court. The Supreme Court of Virginia held that, when a charge is changed, the Court can expunge the original charge — even if doing so expunges both charges as a practical effect. Before
Any time before a judge accepts a guilty plea and finds a defendant guilty, the judge may amend the charge to a different, lower crime and find the defendant guilty of the lower crime, according to an important recent opinion from the Supreme Court of Virginia. Most criminal law attorneys long thought that prosecutors choose the charges (the alleged crimes on which the defendant is accused), the defendant pleads guilty or not guilty to those